I started realizing polar bears were not in as bad a shape as the conventional wisdom had led me to believe

"The conventional wisdom?" Call it ignorant belief in BS. And while that sort of ignorance is commonplace in certain circles, to call it conventional is to insult everyone with a working connection to reality who takes the trouble to be informed.

Polar Bears!? B, B, B, But, But But, I thought they were all extinct because of Global Warming! The MSM told me so! The MSM is wrong? Oh Noooo....Say it ain't so, say it ain't so..

(PS: A recently deceased 85 yr-old dear friend of mine--an extraordinary woman and native of Milwaukee who raced formula cars, and was a 50s/60s folk-singer of some note in NYC--has a husband (still living) who is, among other things, an expert on Polar Bears and has perhaps photographed more in the wild than any man alive. He ALSO calls BS on all the "climate-warming-on-the-road-to-extinction-of-polar-bears" crap..)

Give the author credit that his opinion changes without ideological pride "fuckin' with his head, telling him to say no!" when he comes in contact with reality. Unlike other lefties, or the free traders, PETA folk, and neocons.

These people he writes about are people in the remote boonies. They tend to be practical, "unromantic" people. Like their polar bear solutions...which tend to (1)Beat the NRA Freedom Lover with his Beloved Gun Free to shoot anything he in his minds sees as a threat, with impunity...solution.(2)The only government heroes can save us solution.

He ALSO calls BS on all the "climate-warming-on-the-road-to-extinction-of-polar-bears" crap..)

as I understand it, Polar Bears and Grizzlies are almost exactly the same at the DNA level, just some color variations. Apparently the ranges overlap and depending on climatic conditions over the last several hundred thousand years, the bears change color back and forth.

hell, we see that in birds over a hundred years. urban swallows for example.

Spent a few days in Churchill waiting for the Muskeg Express (the sleepers are laid on soft Arctic substrate so the "express" never gets much over 25 mph). Even in summer all those years ago you could tell that a major part of the town's livelihood revolved around polar bear tourism (mid to late 90's), and there was an amplitude of bears back then, so no, this guy's research skills do not impress. What should/does impress anyone who canoes the rivers in the Hudson Bay watershed is that when the ice melts the bears all go ... inland! upriver, prowling the muskeg flats and river bottoms looking for seal, caribou, fish, and the occasional canoer to round out their summer diet. Being exclusively carnivorous, a fact we all took very much to heart on that trip. We had no problems, but an unarmed group of 4 who were being methodically stalked by 2 adult bears had to be evacuated by helicopter to Churchill and lost everything when the bears ravaged their campsite by way of compensation for THEIR loss.

Cedarford: Churchill may be geographically remote, but it doesn't exactly fit the rather patronizing "boonie" description you've assigned it. It used to be a bustling port with extensive freight and grain facilities, rail connections with Thompson and lots of shipping in and out of the Northern Interior. A lot of that has gone, dried up now, and the facilities linger on more derelict than usable, but you can see what the town used to be. And in the grand old spirit of using the lemons you've been handed to make lemonade, they've taken the most dangerous carnivores on earth, which traverse their town twice yearly and hang around like lethal delinquents -- greatly affecting public safetly and freedom of movement, BTW -- and exploited the lunacy which is polar bear faddism to the absolute max. Good on them, say I, but don't mistake a pragmatic decision to literally not kill the goose that lays the golden egg of ecotourism with a touchy-feely hug-the-poley instinct. They know exactly how dangerous the damn things are, and the precautions they take to protect themselves ought to give you some hint of that.

"People use what they call Churchill welcome mats, which is a piece of plywood laid down in front of the door or leaned up against the door with hundreds of nails sticking out so that when the polar bear comes up to pad across your porch, he's going to get a paw full of sharp nails."

How many lefty readers had a fit of the vapors when they read that line?

Probably very few.

And the reason there are more polar bears now than forty years ago is that hunting ceased in the early seventies.

Polar Bears!? B, B, B, But, But But, I thought they were all extinct because of Global Warming! The MSM told me so!

You are just making shit up if you seriously believe that the mainstream media has said polar bears are extinct. The concern is that if the loss of sea ice continues, polar bear populations will be threatened. Spending a season among one of the greatest polar bear populations in the world and writing an amusing travel book about it, hardly demonstrates the concerns of serious scientific researchers are unfounded.

In Longyearbyen, the capital of Spitsbergen, polar bears are so common and so aggressive that it is illegal to walk outside the built-up parts of town without a rifle. If you don't have one of your own you can rent one at the police station for a small fee.

Freder: I think if you check you'll find that the tribes have never stopped hunting polar bears; they have their own regulations and how and whether they enforce them is up to them. Canada allows hunting of polar bears by non-natives only with a licensed First Nations guide w/ a very costly tag. Same rule may run in Alaska ... I seem to recall a bizarre situation a few years back where a properly licensed hunter with a properly credentialed NA guide shot a bear designated for him by the guide, then the Fish and Wildlife people necropsied it and announced that while it was superficially indistinguishable from a polar bear it was nevertheless a polar bear/grizzly bear hybrid and as such illegal under the tag, and tried to put the guy in prison for 10 years w/ a $50K fine by way of insult to injury. Took years to work out.